More on the translation of Origen’s homilies on Ezekiel

Back in 2011-12, a translation of all of Origen’s works or fragments of works on Ezekiel was in progress. Things went very quiet, but the book more or less existed on disk, awaiting sufficient time to do something about it.

This week I have been getting the first homily set up in Adobe Indesign CS5. The PDF looks very reasonable, although not quite right.

This evening I have sent some comments on it to the typesetter. I have also sent him some more homilies. This has meant going through some of the .doc files, and removing highlighting from the last batch of changes. In some cases the highlighting in purple refuses to be removed at all, and I have to retype the text. This is unwelcome, it must be said.

I find some areas where the book is incomplete. The translator’s preface was never written, nor did I get any details to write his blurb. These are minor things; I can compose both if need be.

More seriously a set of additional fragments — welcome of themselves — needs to be integrated into the main text of the fragments, which will be a pain for me to do. But it is probably do-able, although I’m not sure that I have the bibliography in every case.

All the same I am encouraged. It looks possible, for the first time in a year, that this particular project can be completed and issued.